Kennedy and Laos: Evaluating JFK’s Foreign Policy

An aging Republican president finishes his second and final term in office, leaves the White House, and moves into his countryside home to enjoy his retirement years. A much younger Democratic president is inaugurated and begins his term in office, having campaigned as a fresh personality in the nation’s political landscape. He, his party, and the news media have stoked expectations for a new and youthful trend in policies.

With Eisenhower comfortably settled in Pennsylvania and Kennedy settling into the White House, however, the change from the one president to the next was not as significant as it was advertised to be, as historian John Stormer writes:

The party in power in Washington changed on January 20, 1961. The basic direction of American foreign policy remained the same.

To be sure, there were some substantial differences between the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations: Ike was hesitant to commit American troops into the Vietnam conflict, preferring to send observers, advisors, supplies, and cash. By contrast, Kennedy sent thousands of combat troops into Vietnam.

Both Eisenhower and Kennedy spoke sternly against the Soviet Socialists and the international communist conspiracy which the USSR operated. Kennedy’s efforts to implement his rhetoric were, especially early in his presidency, clumsy. John Stormer indicates how one might evaluate JFK’s foreign policy:

John F. Kennedy himself set the standard by which his administration must be judged. On November 8, 1961, he wrote the foreword for To Turn the Tide, a published collection of the speeches and statements he made in his first ten months as President.

Any presidency must be judged primarily on its actions, and only secondarily on its words. Too often the reverse is the case. Under close examination, there will always be some discrepancy between the words of a president and his concrete policies. No president is perfect. But the gap between word and deed should be kept to a minimum.

Kennedy himself expressed essentially this same principle:

Strong words alone, of course, do not make meaningful policy; they must, in foreign affairs, in particular, be backed by both a will and by weapons that are equally strong. Thus a collection of Presidential statements cannot convey their true perspective unless it is realized or recalled precisely what they signified in committing the power and majesty of the American people and government.

More than one president has made strong statements but failed to back them up with equally strong actions, or as John Stormer explains:

To evaluate President Kennedy’s Administration using the the standard he suggested requires a careful analysis of his words and actions in crisis after crisis.

The two-and-a-half years of the Kennedy presidency were indeed filled with multiple crises. Some of the crises would have happened anyway. Others may have been aimed at Kennedy by malevolent leaders like Khrushchev, Mao, and Castro. A few of the crises may have been created by Kennedy’s miscalculations.

The Soviet Socialists created a large number of foreign policy challenges between January 1960 and November 1963, from Cuba to China, from the USSR to southeast Asia, from Berlin to the Congo. How did Kennedy respond to these provocations? John Stormer explains:

In a widely publicized talk with Congressional leaders on March 26, 1961, President Kennedy promised that Laos, then under attack from Red China and North Viet Nam, would not be permitted to fall.

Yet by late 1962, Laos was solidly under the control of a communist dictatorship, and thousands of soldiers from North Vietnam and from communist China were encamped there. Beyond that, the Kennedy administration was sending foreign aid payments to Laos.

Although Sino-Soviet relationships were fraying in 1962, they had not yet ruptured. The Soviet Socialists and communist mainland China can be understood as acting in concert regarding the situation in Laos.

What happened to Laos between March 1961 and late 1962? Did Kennedy make a promise that he was unable to keep? If so, his promise was rashly made, or made without a thorough understanding of the situation. Presumably his promise was sincere. One hopes that he had a genuine desire to protect the lives and freedoms of the people of Laos.

Two interpretative options are open to the reader: either Kennedy didn’t fully know what he was doing, or he made a promise which he didn’t intend to keep. Neither option is appealing. Presidents should be slow to make such pledges.

American policy was in many ways the same during both the Eisenhower presidency and the Kennedy presidency. Kennedy, however, was weaker in the implementation of that policy.

What They Didn’t Discuss in the Presidential Campaign: The Global Situation in 1960

During the 1952 election season, the Cold War was front and center among the topics examined by the candidates, their parties, the news media, and the votes. Concepts like rollback, containment, and the Truman Doctrine held people’s attention, and the Korean War made these matters deadly.

Harry Truman, who was president in 1952, wasn’t running for reelection. The contest was between Eisenhower and Stevenson. General Dwight David Eisenhower, nicknamed “Ike,” had chosen Richard Nixon as his running mate. Adlai Stevenson chose John Sparkman as his candidate for vice president.

In terms of foreign policy, the voters wanted the Korean War to end quickly, but they also didn’t want defeat in that war. They also wanted a sense of strength in the NATO defensive coalition, and the ability to stop the inroads which Soviet Socialism was making in central and south America.

When it came to domestic policy, Sparkman was strongly pro-segregation, and Stevenson was indecisive, arguing that desegregation must be done slowly. Eisenhower and Nixon, on the other hand, were clearly in favor of desegregation and integration.

Eisenhower won handily, earning a large majority of votes cast by women, and enjoying popularity in all regions within the nation, including a large number of African-American voters, understood clearly that Ike was the one who would open the way to desegregation.

The 1956 election was largely a replay of 1952. Adlai Stevenson was again the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, but this time with a different running mate. In the meantime, Eisenhower had created peace in Korea and convinced the public that he was resisting Soviet aggression in Latin America.

By the time the 1960 presidential election rolled around, the political landscape was different. The two candidates, Nixon and Kennedy, were younger than the candidates in the previous two election cycles. The era of artificial orbital satellites had begun. The campaign had a different tone, as historian John Stormer notes:

Unlike the election campaign of 1952 when Communist infiltration of government and appeasement of world communism were key issues, these crucial topics were largely ignored in the 1960 presidential campaign.

At the end of the 1956 presidential campaign, only days before the vote, the Hungarian Revolution began and was quickly ended by brutal Soviet military force. The uprising’s timing was such that the American electorate didn’t have time to fully digest the details and implications of the event before voting. It could have been more thoughtfully examined in the course of the 1960 campaign, but it wasn’t.

Likewise, the 1960 election offered an occasion for a nuanced discussion of the Cuban situation. In 1958-1959, Fidel Castro had led the Communist Revolution to a victory, taken control of Cuba, become the dictator there, and began his reign which would eventually eventually be responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Cubans. Yet, in the campaigning, there was little or no serious analysis of Cuba, Castro, the revolution, or the fact that the U.S. State Department had, through malice or incompetence, enabled Castro’s dictatorship, as John Stormer reports:

Tragic handling of the Hungarian revolt was given passing mention by the Democrats, but only in areas with high concentrations of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Castro's rise to power was discussed in a partisan way. The sordid story of the State Department's direct responsibility for hiding the bearded dictator's communist affiliations, as disclosed by a Senate committee, was not mentioned.

A careful parsing of world events was absent because both political parties were intent on marketing their candidates rather than presenting a serious policy platform. The fact that the international communist conspiracy was threatening world peace, and threatening the freedoms of people in many nations, didn’t make for good advertising.

Nixon, as Ike’s VP, didn’t want to talk about any less-than-ideal outcomes which had emerged from the Eisenhower administration. Within the Republican Party, those intent on presenting a pleasant candidate urged those familiar with the global situation to be quiet, as John Stormer writes:

Richard Nixon was not likely to dredge up the record of failure and appeasement of the Administration of which he was part. Under pressures for "party unity" anticommunist Republicans remained silent.

In 1960, there was still a small embattled pro-freedom group within the Democratic Party. It echoed Truman’s sterner words — although Truman’s actions sometimes failed to live up to the sternness of his words — and hoped to speak for human rights and against communism. But the Democratic Party had lost its credibility to speak on the issue of world communism, because it had rallied around Alger Hiss, a known Soviet espionage agent who’d influenced policy decisions during the Roosevelt administration.

A party which supported Hiss, who’d let Stalin have his way at the Yalta Conference, couldn’t be taken seriously if it spoke out against the brutality of Soviet Socialist aggression. Neither party was willing to directly state the matter during the campaign, as John Stormer explains:

The few knowledgeable anti-communists in the Democratic Party were paralyzed by politics also. They knew that any loud voice raised against the dismal record of Modern Republicanism would have provoked only partisan replies, such as, “Well, we don’t have an Alger Hiss in our party.”

In a series of congressional hearings, William Wieland was exposed as having been instrumental in reducing American support for the people of Cuba and thereby helping Castro take power. William Wieland was a diplomat in the U.S. State Department. He, along with William Snow and Roy Rubottom, implemented a policy in which U.S. support for the Cuba people was reduced.

What did this have to do with the 1960 presidential campaign?

John Stormer refers to Wieland and his co-conspirators as “the William Wielands,” a somewhat awkward pluralizing of the name, but this blatant failure to oppose the international communist conspiracy should have been a topic in the 1960 campaign — yet it wasn’t:

Candidate John F. Kennedy didn't turn the spotlight on the tragic actions of the William Wielands in government. Instead, when Kennedy became President, William Wieland was promoted to the State Department committee charged with revising security procedures. As was noted in the opening chapter, President Kennedy denounced the woman reporter who described Wieland as a "security risk" during a televised press conference and questioned his appointment. Kennedy stated that Wieland's record, cleared by the State Department, qualified him for the highly sensitive post.

Historians have written in detail about the 1960 election: how it was a turning-point in the use of media in modern campaigning, how JFK’s youthful image shaped the public perception of the presidency, and how close the ballot counts were. But another aspect of the election was its failure to meaningfully acknowledge or address the threat which the Soviet Socialists and their global network posed.